[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17199-17201]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             PRESIDENT OBAMA'S IMMIGRATION EXECUTIVE ORDER

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, as the Appropriations Committees prepare to 
release the product of their negotiations on a spending bill this 
afternoon, I rise today to discuss the troubling development that has 
made their work all the more challenging: President Obama's immigration 
Executive order. By circumventing Congress, the President has dispensed 
with the duly-enacted law of the land in a unilateral attempt to alter 
the legal status of millions of immigrants.
  Unfortunately, this issue of Executive overreach is not a new one. 
Over the past year, I have come to the Senate floor repeatedly to lay 
out my objections to President Obama's lawlessness--from the release of 
Guantanamo detainees to ObamaCare, from his purported recess 
appointments to Benghazi. Today I come to discuss this latest 
astonishing instance in the area of immigration.
  Immigration is a complex and divisive issue, and Americans hold a 
wide variety of views on the matter. But one thing that should not be 
controversial is the President's duty to place fidelity to the 
Constitution over partisan politics.
  The Constitution vests lawmaking authority with Congress, not the 
President. And the Framers specifically sought to end centuries of 
abuses by the English monarchs, who claimed the power to dispense with 
the laws of the land, by requiring the President to take care that the 
laws be faithfully executed. The Constitution does not suggest or 
invite the President to enforce the law; it obligates him to do so.
  The President and his executive branch, of course, exercise 
prosecutorial discretion--the discretion to choose not to prosecute 
certain cases. But that power stems from considerations of fairness and 
equity in particular cases. Instead of requiring individualized 
determinations in specific cases, the President's latest Executive 
order claims the power to sweep up millions of people based on only a 
few broad, widely shared criteria.
  The President is also within his rights not to prosecute when there 
are not sufficient resources to do so, but the Obama administration has 
never explained how the Executive order would save money. In fact, the 
administration's own policy advisers have acknowledged that a work 
permitting program will be expensive and will take away resources from 
law enforcement. While no one disagrees that capturing and removing 
violent criminals should be our highest immigration priority, President 
Obama has gone much further and made current immigration law 
essentially a dead letter for millions of illegal immigrants.
  President Obama cannot credibly claim that he is attempting to 
execute immigration law faithfully when ICE agents were forced to 
release 68,000 potentially deportable aliens last year alone, when the 
administration took disciplinary action against ICE officers for making 
lawful arrests, and when the President of the National ICE Council felt 
compelled to testify before Congress that although ``most Americans 
assume that ICE agents and officers are empowered by the government to 
enforce the law . . . nothing could be further from the truth.''
  Moreover, despite the administration's claim to the contrary, 
President Obama's action is not comparable to the Executive actions 
taken by President Reagan or even President George

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H.W. Bush. Even the Washington Post's editorial board found that claim 
by the White House to be ``indefensible.'' Presidents Reagan and Bush 
simply implemented the enforcement priorities established in laws that 
Congress actually passed. By contrast President Obama has sought to 
change the law before Congress has acted, so he cannot rely on 
Congress's authority to enforce the policy he prefers. Here President 
Obama has acted directly in the face of congressional opposition, and 
we should call his Executive order what it is: an attempt to bypass the 
constitutionally ordained legislative process and rewrite the law 
unilaterally.
  We are all sometimes disappointed and even angry about the outcomes 
of the legislative process. I have certainly felt that way many times 
over the course of my 38 years here. But the right response is to 
redouble our efforts to get it right, not to try to subvert our 
constitutional system.
  The President should heed his own wisdom from as recently as last 
fall when he said that by broadening immigration enforcement carve-outs 
``then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think 
would be very difficult to defend legally. So that is not an option. . 
. . What I've said is there is a path to get this done, and that's 
through Congress.''
  Even beyond the legal and constitutional problems with the Executive 
order, the President's approach is also bad policy. His Executive order 
greatly undercuts the chances for lasting immigration reform because it 
undermines our confidence that the President will live with any 
compromises we agree to forge through the legislative process. The 
Executive order is even bad for those who are currently here 
illegally--those who are supposed to benefit from it. Instead of 
temporary half measures, they need the certainty that only legislation 
can provide.
  Last month, in an election in which President Obama insisted that all 
of his policies were on the ballot, the American people delivered the 
President a decisive rebuke. Many of us from Congress took the right 
message from the election--that it is time for us to come together to 
find areas of agreement and to govern like adults.
  Apparently President Obama missed that message. To announce this 
Executive order after the defeat at the polls displays shocking 
arrogance. Given how the White House and its allies in the media keep 
raising the specter of a shutdown or impeachment, it is clear the 
President is attempting to goad Congress into a fight rather than work 
with us in the difficult job of actually legislating.
  Unlike President Obama, I am committed to making real progress toward 
implementing lasting immigration reform. I supported the Senate's 
comprehensive immigration bill last year. Even though the bill was far 
from perfect, I voted for it because I believe in working together to 
get something done on this vitally important issue. As I have long 
argued, the way to get real immigration reform back on track is not for 
the President to insist on his ``my way or the highway'' approach, 
either by trying to enact his preferred policy unilaterally or even for 
him to demand an all-or-nothing comprehensive bill. Instead we should 
consider individual immigration reform measures that can win broad 
support and help rebuild trust in our country. Only by doing so will we 
clear a path forward for other more far-reaching reforms.
  Take the area of high-skilled immigration. We face a high-skilled 
worker shortage that has become a national crisis. In April for the 
second year in a row the Federal Government reached its current H-1B 
visa quota for workers just 5 days after accepting applications. 
Employers submitted 172,500 petitions for just 85,000 available visas, 
so American companies were unable to hire nearly 90,000 high-skilled 
workers essential to help grow their domestic businesses, develop 
innovative technologies at home rather than abroad, and compete 
internationally. Keep in mind most of these folks we have educated in 
our colleges and universities. They could be of great help to us.
  I have been trying to get H-1B expansion through here for a number of 
months. I think we will get it through honorably. In response to this 
crisis I worked with my friends Senators Klobuchar, Rubio, and Coons to 
introduce the bipartisan immigration innovation or the I-Squared Act. 
Our bill provides a thoughtful, lasting legislative framework that 
would increase the number of H-1B visas, based on annual market demand, 
to attract the highly skilled workers and innovators our economy so 
desperately needs.
  Unilateralism is not the way forward on immigration. If the President 
is serious about enacting meaningful immigration reform, he can choose 
to take the first essential step. Even in the current partisan climate 
there is a widespread consensus and real opportunity for bipartisan, 
bicameral reform for our outdated visa system for economically 
essential high-skilled immigrants.
  The concrete legislative victory where there is already considerable 
consensus would help build trust and good will among those who disagree 
sharply over other areas of immigration policy and would mark a 
critical first step along the path to broader reform.
  For the life of me I cannot understand why the President doesn't 
accept this hand we are extending to him, knowing that we educate these 
people, get them their college degrees, their master's degrees, their 
doctoral degrees, their Ph.D.s, and then we push them out of the 
country when they want to stay and help us in the continually evolving 
and impressive high-tech world. It is mind-boggling to me that we do 
this.
  Canada even advertises in California and in the States south of the 
Canadian border: Come to Canada. You are welcome here. I commend Canada 
for having the brains and guts and ability and the political instincts 
to attract these very highly educated--educated in the United States--
people, to help them in their high-tech world, in their engineering 
world, in their mathematical world, in their science world. Of course 
we can name a whole host of other areas where they are now helping 
Canadians when they were educated here, wanted to stay here, wanted to 
be part of America, and we could not provide a means whereby these 
people could help us and at the same time an intelligent means that 
people in our society could accept.
  That is not the only action we could take. Naturally we should work 
together as Democrats and Republicans to do real immigration reform. We 
have 11 million or more people here who aren't going to go back to 
their countries. Many of them have never been in their countries, such 
as the children who were born here and young children who were brought 
here and never knew anything about their parents' former country. We 
have to solve these problems, and we don't do it by unilateral actions 
by a President who basically doesn't seem to give a darn, except for 
his own unilateral approach to things. That is not what the Presidency 
should be.
  There are three branches of government. They are coequal. The 
President should enforce laws that are enacted only by Congress. The 
Supreme Court should interpret laws that are enacted by Congress if 
there are reasons for doing so. In this case we have a President who 
basically is ignoring the law, just acting on his own, as though 
Congress doesn't mean a thing, even though it means everything in these 
areas.
  I counsel the President to change these ways and work with us. I 
think there will be more people willing to work with him should he do 
so, and we can solve these problems--we can solve them--not in some 
stupid, unilateral way that is going to create more problems than it 
solves but in a way the American people will accept.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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